“There was this guy in the neighborhood named Patty Antiques,” Alite said. “He was a mob guy and he had an antique store on Jamaica Avenue where he sold a lot of stolen goods. One day he came into the deli. I was talking to some friends who were there. One of them told a joke and I started laughing. For some reason Patty Antiques thought I was laughing at him. He was a little bit crazy.”
He started screaming at Alite, threatening to kill him. One of the guys from the clubhouse across the street happened to be in the deli and stepped in, telling Patty Antiques that Alite was a friend of his and the other guys from the clubhouse and that he should just let it go.
Alite thought that was the end of it. The next day, after he had finished a workout at a small, makeshift gym a few doors from the deli, Alite was standing on the corner when Patty Antiques pulled up in his old, rusted white van, jumped out, and waved a handgun at him. Alite took off as the demented wiseguy got off four or five shots. None hit the target. Alite sprinted up a small side street that he knew the van would not be able to negotiate and then took a circuitous route home. Two hours later, Patty Antiques was outside Alite’s house brandishing an even larger gun, one that Alite’s grandmother and sister would call a machine gun.
Antiques was waving the gun and shouting, “Johnny Alite! Johnny Alite! Where are you? Why don’t you come out and play?”
Alite’s sister and grandmother were on the porch. They screamed at Antiques, telling him they were calling the police. Antiques, a convicted felon who couldn’t possess a weapon, took off. But Alite stopped his sister from calling the cops. Instead, he dialed the home phone number of his former Little League baseball coach, Albert Ruggiano.
Ruggiano had coached him as a twelve-year-old and now occasionally worked out with him at the corner gym. Ruggiano’s father, Anthony “Fat Andy” Ruggiano, was a capo in the Gambino crime family and was the guy who ran the neighborhood. Anybody with a problem went to him.
“He was like president of the United States as far as we were concerned in our neighborhood,” Alite would tell a federal jury years later. “If there was a problem, you go to him. You don’t go to the police. So that’s what I did.”
After Alite explained the situation, Albert Ruggiano said he would talk with his father. A few minutes later, he called Alite back and told him, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of it.”
The next day he got word that Patty Antiques had been spoken to and that he wouldn’t bother Alite again. But two days later, Alite was again running away from the crazy mobster who had spotted him on the street and opened fire. As soon as he got home, Alite called Albert Ruggiano. Ruggiano couldn’t believe it, but knew his father wouldn’t stand for that kind of disrespect. He told Alite to meet him at the Finish Line, a sports bar in Ozone Park where a lot of wiseguys hung out.
Alite got there first. While he was waiting, John Gotti Jr. and a few others walked in. Alite had met Gotti a few times casually. They knew each other, but weren’t friends, hadn’t yet struck up any kind of business relationship.
Junior was in military school at the time, but everyone knew his pedigree. His father was, like Fat Andy, a capo in the Gambino family. Junior wanted to know what Alite was doing at the bar. He explained that he had to meet with Albert Ruggiano about something. He wasn’t about to share the specifics with Gotti or anyone else. They talked for about ten minutes, sports and street talk. Then Ruggiano arrived and signaled Alite over.
Ruggiano shook Alite’s hand as they sat down at a table in the corner. But before he even brought up the Patty Antiques situation, he asked Alite about Junior Gotti, did he know him, was he doing anything with him, those kinds of things.
When Alite told him it was just a casual, hello, how ya doin’ kind of relationship, Ruggiano told him to keep it that.
“Here’s some advice from a friend,” Albert said. “Avoid that guy, you hear? He’s a punk, a loud-mouth. He thinks he’s a tough guy. No one respects him. No one ever will.”
Alite didn’t know what to make of the warning. He knew the name Gotti carried weight in the neighborhood and he wasn’t sure where Albert Ruggiano was coming from. So he just nodded and said he would remember. It was the first time anyone had warned him off the Gottis. It wouldn’t be the last.
Ruggiano quickly shifted to the matter at hand. He told Alite to make sure he was out in a public place with some friends the next night. At first, Alite didn’t get it. Ruggiano shook his head and smiled.
“It’s important that you have an alibi,” his former baseball coach said.
The plan was to grab Patty Antiques and either beat him or kill him. Murder was more likely because Antiques was acting crazy and because he had disregarded Fat Andy’s clear edict to leave Alite alone. But Antiques must have gotten word. He disappeared. So the next night, some of Fat Andy’s guys grabbed Antiques’s stepson, a twenty-year-old who was always hanging around the neighborhood.
“They took him up to the roof of a building and threw him off,” Alite said. “He survived, but broke his back, his arm, both legs, sprained his neck. He was in bad shape. He ended up in a body cast for about a year.”
The incident left Alite with mixed feelings. On the one hand, he felt a strange sense of pride in the fact that Ruggiano and his family—the mob—stepped up on his behalf. It was something that everyone in the neighborhood would know about and it would give him status and a degree of respect.
On the other hand, Alite couldn’t justify what happened to the stepson. He wasn’t the one stalking John Alite; it was his crazy stepfather. Yet he paid the price. It said something about the Mafia that Alite wasn’t yet ready to acknowledge. It wasn’t about honor and loyalty. Those were just words. It was about absolute power. That’s what the mob wanted. And it did whatever was necessary to get it.
As the train rumbled through the French countryside, Alite’s thoughts drifted back again to those card games in the Bronx and how on the ride home one morning he had innocently asked his father who those men were.
Matthew Alite tried to explain to his young son that those men were part of a separate world. It was hard to make an eight-year-old understand, but John Alite remembered one thing his father had told him.
“Don’t ever ask them for a favor,” Matthew Alite said. “Because if you do and if they grant it, you’ll be in their debt. Then they’ll own you.”
That’s the situation Alite was in after the Patty Antiques incident, but sports almost saved him. He got a baseball scholarship to the University of Tampa and that September, much to his father’s satisfaction, he left Queens for Florida. He spent one semester down south, but injured his elbow that fall season. He came home and underwent Tommy John surgery, but it didn’t work. Every time he threw a baseball, he got an excruciating pain that ran from his elbow to his shoulder.
His career as a baseball player was over. He enrolled in Queens College and became a fixture in the neighborhood. He stayed in shape by working out regularly at a local gym, where he connected with some guys he had grown up with: Billy Estrema, who was working as muscle and a collector for a Luchese crew; Patsy Andriano, who was Alite’s cousin and was working for Ciro Perrone, the Genovese capo; and Mikey Merlo, who had been part of the 7N9 Gang when they were kids.
The gang took its name from the neighborhood around Seventy-Ninth Street and Jamaica Avenue. John Gebert, George Grosso, and Kevin Bonner were also part of that group. Alite knew them all, but didn’t run with them when he was young. Now he found himself moving in their circles.
Merlo was dealing drugs on a small scale but had big plans. Estrema and Andriano were also ambitious. They talked with Alite about branching out, about setting up their own little organization and generating some cash. They pulled a couple of robberies and did some strong-arm shakedowns, spin-offs of the stuff they were already doing for the mob. Alite had a minor role in that action, which may have saved his life.
Within three months, Estrema, Andriano, and Merlo were dead. (Andriano’s s
on, also named Patsy, would later become a young, teenage member of Alite’s mob crew.)
Estrema was shot in the head, his hogtied body found in a dumpster. Andriano answer a knock on his door one night and was greeted with a shotgun blast to the face. Another to the back of his head finished the job. Merlo also was shotgunned to death. The word on the street was that his shooting was in retaliation for the robbery of a drug dealer whom he was suspected of setting up.
The motives for the murders of Estrema and Andriano were never made clear, but the message Alite took from the violence was that individual entrepreneurship wasn’t welcome on the streets. It was important to be connected. Your life might depend on it.
That point was driven home again when his sister’s then boyfriend came to him for help. He and another guy had been moving drugs, small quantities of cocaine, in the neighborhood and were paid a visit by a couple of mob associates who demanded a street tax. It was a classic mob shakedown.
“This guy who was dating my sister asked me to go see my friend, Albert Ruggiano,” Alite said. “So that’s what I did.”
Ruggiano was almost apologetic when Alite told him the story. He didn’t know, he said, that they were friends of Alite. Then he told him, “Look, if you can make a score, go ahead and do it. I don’t want anything, but tell them to pay you a hundred a week for taking care of their problem. Tell them they got nothing to worry about.”
It was easy money and Alite jumped at the chance. Once again his connection to Ruggiano had brought him a benefit. He felt protected in the neighborhood and saw an opportunity to make even more money. That’s when he started moving cocaine on his own.
He was stashing the drugs under his bed, using his bedroom to cut and package the product before he put it out on the street. Nothing big, but enough to generate a couple hundred each week in profit.
He made another connection with Sonny DiGiorgio, who worked for Angelo Ruggiero. Ruggiero had brought John J. Gotti into the mob. Both operated under the umbrella of Aniello Dellacroce, the crime family underboss. Alite had heard all those names but had no perspective at that point.
He was a kid, a twenty-year-old whose dream of playing baseball, maybe even making it a professional career, was over. But his chance to be a wiseguy was very real and he wasn’t about to let the opportunity pass. His father, however, had other ideas. He discovered the drugs and a gun under his son’s bed and shipped him off to live with an uncle in California.
“I was there about a year,” Alite said. “I was living in Valencia and had enrolled in College of the Canyons.”
It was a second chance to have a college career, but it didn’t work out. There was a fight in a bar with a guy who turned out to be an off-duty police officer. And then a stabbing in a follow-up incident tied to the first fight. Alite was arrested and charged with assault, and pleaded guilty. He caught a break. The judge told him to go home, to leave California and never come back.
By the summer of 1983, a year after heading west, Alite was back in Queens, back in the old neighborhood, back dealing with some of the guys he had grown up with and with the mobsters who held sway. Shortly after he returned, Gebert made the connection for him with Junior Gotti. It was a business and personal relationship that would change Alite’s life forever.
As the train pulled into the station at the Gare du Nord in Paris, Alite noticed several police officials coming on board. They began to question passengers, paying particular interest to him and his wife.
“I spoke a little French, they spoke some English,” he said. “I had a fake passport. I was never sure who it was that they were looking for. But they let us go.”
It would be another eighteen months, with stops in a dozen other countries, before Alite was arrested in Brazil. As he walked from the train in Paris that day back in 2003, John Alite thought he could run forever.
CHAPTER 5
Four months after the Paul Castellano murder, John Gotti’s underboss Frank DeCicco was killed when a bomb planted under his car was detonated as he opened the driver’s-side door.
The blast left a two-foot-wide crater in the street and shattered windows in nearby homes and businesses along Eighty-Sixth Street in the Bensonhurt section of Brooklyn. DeCicco was ripped apart. Another mobster who was standing next to him was seriously injured.
The bomber thought that man was John Gotti. It wasn’t.
Gotti was supposed to attend a meeting that Sunday afternoon with DeCicco at the Veterans and Friends Club, a mob hangout on Eighty-Sixth Street near Fourteenth Avenue. At the last minute, he canceled. He had more important things on his mind. He had just beaten an assault case in state court but had a racketeering indictment hanging over him. That trial was due to start later in the year. The feds were also preparing for opening arguments in the highly publicized Mafia Commission trial, in which the leaders of all five mob families had been indicted. Castellano and Dellacroce were two of the original eleven defendants. They obviously would not be tried, but the case itself was indicative of what was going on in the underworld at the time.
Gotti had taken over the biggest Mafia family in New York at the same time that U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani was using mob prosecutions to build a reputation and a political career. The feds had finally figured out how to use the RICO statute that Bobby’s Kennedy’s pompous pal Robert Blakey had sculpted a decade earlier. Now prosecutions were focused on criminal enterprises and the crimes that advanced the agendas of those enterprises. Leaders could be held accountable for every “predicate act” that was cited in a RICO indictment. The Mafia Commission case included 151 counts.
These were not the best of times for the American Mafia. Gotti would have a brief if meteoric run at the top, but all the while he was looking over his shoulder, ducking both the feds and mobsters. The Genovese family was not going to ignore the Castellano murder. Someone would have to answer for what happened to Big Paulie.
DeCicco may have been the first victim of that vendetta, but John Gotti was the primary target.
Everyone knew the bombing was retaliation for the murder of Castellano, but at first no one was sure where it had come from. Gotti and Gravano, who replaced DeCicco as underboss, speculated that the murder had been carried out by a group of Sicilian mobsters who operated in New York and had been close to Castellano.
The Siggies used bombs all the time. What’s more, everyone knew it was against the rules for American Mafiosi to use explosives. The chance of innocent bystanders getting hurt was too great. In fact the DeCicco bomb had injured a neighborhood woman on her way to her elderly mother’s birthday party in a house across the street from where DeCicco’s Buick Electra had been parked. The woman sustained minor injuries.
The irony in Gotti’s thinking wasn’t lost on Alite, who at that point was spending almost every day with Junior and who saw Gotti at least twice a week. On Wednesday nights everyone had to show up at the Ravenite, the Mulberry Street social club in Little Italy that Gotti had taken over after Dellacroce died. And on Saturday nights everyone was expected to check in at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Queens.
Alite was watching and listening and trying to learn. He knew his future depended on it. Even he, a novice in the business at that time, saw the flaw in Gotti’s thinking. Gotti had broken the primary rule of the American Mafia by killing a sitting boss without Commission approval, yet he was looking to those same rules in trying to figure out who had killed his underboss.
Later word got out that members of the Genovese crime family, not some crazy Sicilians, were responsible for the bombing. Members of the Luchese organization were also in on the plot along with Danny Marino, a Gambino capo who headed a faction of the family that didn’t want to fall in line under Gotti.
“We’re all on alert again,” Alite said. “Although at the time nobody knew the bomb was supposed to be for John.”
John Gotti’s Rules of Leadership: Members and associates are not to speak to the media. Granting interviews or appearing on televis
ion is prohibited.
While he might have been naïve in his thinking, Gotti was also clever in the way he responded once he saw himself as a possible target. Instead of heading for the shadows, Gotti ran to the spotlight. No one was supposed to talk to the media, but Gotti had certain reporters, like the highly regarded TV investigative reporter John Miller, whom he favored. He wouldn’t grant lengthy interviews, but he was always ready with a sound bite or a quip as he entered or exited a courthouse or was approached in a bar or restaurant or on the street.
He also ratcheted up his “involvement” in the community. The famous Fourth of July barbecue, block party, and fireworks in Queens grew out of this publicity campaign. Part of it fit with Gotti’s temperament and was genuine. But part of it, Alite believes, was also a defense mechanism.
“He figured he was less likely to be targeted if he was around the media or if he had a lot of innocent people around him,” Alite said. “It was a smart move.”
If he had had his own publicist, Gotti couldn’t have worked it any better. Over the next four years, as Alite watched in amazement, John Gotti became the face of the American Mafia. He was the country’s celebrity gangster, an almost iconic figure the likes of which had not been seen since Al Capone.
While law enforcement investigators shook their heads at the bravado and arrogance and old-time mobsters cringed, those familiar with Italian culture nodded knowingly. Like Capone, Gotti traced his ethnic roots to Naples, not Sicily. The stereotypical male in Naples is a rooster who likes to look good and, as important, wants everyone to know it.
Facia una bella figura is the Italian expression that describes this behavior. “Make a good physical impression” is the literal translation but what it means is that while it’s important to do well, it’s just as important to look good while you’re doing it. It’s the antithesis of the dark, hide in a cave, stay in the shadows Sicilian temperament that extolled secrecy above all else and for generations was the standard for any Mafioso.
Gotti's Rules Page 6
